Heroes of the Storm entering next phase of technical alpha

Within the next few weeks, Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's upcoming MOBA, will enter the next phase of its Technical Alpha. This will allow opted-in players from North America, Europe, Latin America, South East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand a chance at being selected to play the game ahead of its release.

"Our hope is that in the coming months we can release fully localized clients to support additional languages," Blizzard explained. "Thereafter, we intend to widen our testing to also include Taiwan, Korea, and China. Following that, we are looking to implement fully localized clients for all remaining languages."

In the same post announcing the next phase, Blizzard also provided a brief recap of the current state of the game.

Heroes of the Storm is still deep in development, and during the past few months we’ve introduced a variety of changes to the game, including an overhauled UI, new heroes, skins, and more, but we’re not done yet! We have a lot of plans in store, and we will continue to iterate and improve the game throughout the coming weeks and months ahead.

As we’ve said before, the main goal of the Technical Alpha is to help us better examine how our infrastructure and tech will function across a much broader spectrum of machines and connection types. What’s more, inviting external Alpha testers allows us to take a closer look at our hardware needs so that we can be absolutely sure we’re able to support the entire Heroes population as the community grows. This phase of testing is necessary for us, and feedback from this phase continues to help us fine-tune the game’s features and balance prior to releasing wider scale testing. In order to make this process as fast and efficient as possible, we’ve needed to keep the scale of the testing relatively small and restricted, with the intention being that we would start small first, and then expand once it made sense from a development perspective.

We know that players from around the world are excited to help us test Heroes, and we’re pleased to announce that the next major patch will begin the Technical Alpha invite process for players outside of the United States!

While the initial testing phase includes a "very limited" pool of players, Blizzard is continuously invited more players on a regular basis. So if you want to partake in the Heroes of the Storm technical alpha, you can sign up here.

Admittedly, I haven't played much of the game since I was first invited to the alpha, but even back then it seemed in pretty polished. You can check out my thoughts from back in March here.